Yesterday at work I had a discussion with one of the guys in charge of our DNS. I asked him to create a CNAME record on one of the domains under our authority, pointing to an external canonical name, but he kindly refused. So I asked whether this was company policy of some kind, as I saw no technical reasons for this not to work, but he answered:

No, the problem is technical; the hostname one points to, has to be managed on the same DNS-platform and this can’t be done in this case as we’re not the SOA for the external domain

Making a SOA on a server where that isn’t allowed, is not really according to the standards.

As the change was pretty urgent and there weren’t any important downsides, I adapted my change request for the DNS-entry to be created as an A-record. But in the mean time I started reading up on CNAME’s on Wikipedia and glanced over the two relevant RFC’s (RFC 1034 and RFC 2181), but I really can’t find any confirmation of what my (respected) colleague is referring to. But I’m sure there are smarter people reading this here blogpost who might be able to explain what I am obviously missing, no?

So if you, like me, believe that we as internet-users should unite to take action against any law that goes against our interest (think SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, HADOPI, …), then joining the Internet Defense League might be a good idea.

Never mind my initial enthusiasm about SoundCloud on Android; I uninstalled the bugger after noticing extreme battery drain, which seems linked to its background synchronization. Before uninstalling, I tried to:

switch on “wifi only syncing”, which did not help

disable all 4 items (left part of image) being synced, which did not help

disable SoundCloud sync altogether, which did not seem to help either

remove the SoundCloud-item from the list of synchronization sources, which inconveniently also logged me out of the app rendering it pretty useless

I contacted SoundCloud support, who confirmed they are working on a fix (although the release notes mentions battery drain a couple of times, guess this is not an entirely new issue). But until then I guess I’ll have to download the individual tracks from the SoundCloud website to listen to “It is what it is” on my Galaxy SII, no?

I had already created my SoundCloud-account two years ago, but I only started to use it earlier this week after searching the web for DJ-sets by Kevin Saunderson (whom I heard play a mesmerizing set on “Studio Ibiza” shortly before). I clicked around and also found Four Tet, Floating Points and Flying Lotus and well … I was hooked. To my disappointment SoundCloud does not offer RSS-feeds, but I found CloudFlipper to be a nice workaround and started adding feeds to my RSS-reader.

Great and all that, but it turned out to be pretty cumbersome to add individual SoundCloud pages to my RSS-reader that way. After logging into the web app and installing SoundCloud’s magnificent Android app I found it a lot more convenient to just follow all those great artists (mainly electro) and seeing their work stream by on the dashboard.